In 1836, HMS Beagle arrived at Sydney Cove carrying the
naturalist Charles Darwin. Darwin spent 18 days in New South Wales, where he
attempted to gain a little understanding of the geology and natural history of
Australia. Of particular interest, was one day he spent as a guest at the
Wallerawang Homestead. While there he had his first encounter with unique
Australian species such as the platypus and visited the Wolgan Valley, which
left him struck by its sheer size and baffled by its formation.

On 12th January 1836, towards the end of a five year voyage,
HMS Beagle arrived at Sydney Cove and Charles Darwin set foot on Australian
soil for the first time.

Though Darwin’s visit to Australia was but a brief stop on
an epic journey, whose primary focus had been a survey of the continent of
South America, it is not to say that it was of little significance. Darwin
spent just eighteen days in New South Wales before the Voyage of the Beagle
continued on to Tasmania, but in the brief period available to him he wasted no
time in heading inland in the direction of Bathurst, as he attempted to gain a
little understanding of the geology and natural history of Australia.

Of particular interest, in the light of these aims, was one
day he spent as a guest at the Wallerawang Homestead. A large pastoral
property, granted to the free settling Scotsman James Walker on his arrival in
the colony in 1823, Wallerawang was one of the first to be established west of
the Blue Mountains. Following the marriage of Edwin Barton, engineer-in-chief
of Lithgow’s Zig Zag railway, to Walker’s daughter, the homestead’s name was
later changed to Barton Park. In 1979 the damning of the Coxs river submerged
the entire homestead, leaving just a few rescued sandstone blocks from the
original house in which Darwin stayed.

After spending the night of 18th January at Wallerawang,
Darwin accepted an invitation to hunt for kangaroos. At this point in his life
- he was 26 years old at the time - Darwin was a keen hunter, both at home in
England and on his travels. However, he was, as this voyage wore on, beginning
to appreciate the pleasure of observation and learning more highly than the
sport itself. He was, therefore, not too downcast when the expedition failed to
encounter a single kangaroo. There was plenty else to pique his interest.

During the course of the hunting expedition Darwin and his
companions headed north-west of Wallerawang as far as the Wolgan Valley, a
place which left him struck by its sheer size and more than a little baffled by
its formation. This caused him great consternation and his notes from 19th
January contain page after page of description of this valley and differing
theories as to how it was created. Though initially correctly attributing its
formation to gradual erosion by water, the sheer scale of the valley led him to
conclude that this idea was ‘preposterous’ and caused him, mistakenly, to seek
alternative explanations.

Despite failing in their primary objective of kangaroo
hunting, in his diary, Darwin is able to describe his first encounter with
another of Australia’s unique creatures:

The Grey-hounds pursued a Kangaroo Rat into a hollow tree
from out of which we dragged it: it is an animal, as big as a Rabbit, but with
the figure of a Kangaroo.

As interesting as this encounter was in its own right, and
it was after all the naturalist’s first opportunity to inspect an Australian
marsupial in detail, of perhaps more interest to Darwin was the effect of
interaction between native and European species. He noted the rapid decline
that had taken place in the numbers of emus and kangaroos and the destructive
role that the English Greyhound had played on species ill equipped to deal with
it. In his journal, published in 1839, he went further and stated:

It may be long before these animals are altogether
exterminated, but their doom is fixed.

While, happily, the kangaroo and emu are still very much
with us, this gloomy prediction has come true for numerous native Australian
species, including the Eastern Bettong, a species closely related to the
‘Kangaroo Rat’ described by Darwin.

On returning from the day’s hunting, Darwin took a stroll to
Coxs River, where he encountered the platypus, an animal even more
extraordinary than the kangaroo rat.

I … had the good fortune to see several of the famous
Ornithorhynchus paradoxus. They were diving and playing about the surface of
the water, but showed so little of their bodies, that they might easily have
been mistaken for water-rats.

His encounter with the platypus leads on to further
consideration of the evident similarities between Australian fauna and quite
clearly different species found elsewhere in the world. He goes on to state:

Earlier in the evening I had been lying on a sunny bank
& was reflecting on the strange character of the Animals of this country as
compared to the rest of the World. A Disbeliever in everything beyond his own
reason, might exclaim, “Surely two distinct Creators must have been [at] work;
their object however has been the same & certainly in each case the end is
complete”.

Then, in describing how he observed the pitfall of a
lion-ant identical to that of a European ant, but half its size, he continues:

Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple
& yet so artificial a contrivance? I cannot think so.- The one hand has
worked all over the world.

It is worth noting that when making this observation Darwin
had in the previous few hours seen Australian magpies that to a strong degree
resembled their European counterparts, a platypus that at first glance appeared
like a water rat, and a rabbit sized kangaroo that indeed behaved much like a
rabbit, despite all of these creatures clearly having been created to quite
different specifications.

The question is how to interpret Darwin’s comments. If the
‘one hand’ to which Darwin refers is the force of nature then we could be
seeing here the first glimpse of his famous ‘Theory of Evolution’. It could
conceivably also refer to God, and so the ambiguity remains. With Darwin’s
family still holding out hope that he would enter the ministry on his return to
England, this ambiguity appears deliberate.